Nancy Jarman Davis, 51, a mother of three, died December 17, 2004, in Onslow County, North Carolina.
She was fatally shot by her former boyfriend one day after informing him that she was leaving after temporarily returning to his home to help him get through a serious illness. He said he shot her accidentally, and her documentation of 22 years of abuse was not allowed in the trial. A jury set him free, and he walked out of the courtroom carrying the shotgun he killed her with.
Nancy’s story is poignantly shared by her daughter, a child of domestic violence, one of millions, and one of thousands upon thousands who are grieving a parent lost to domestic violence.
Nancy’s story begins…” He told me he couldn’t live without me. Like everything else, it was a lie. What he should have said was that I couldn’t live without him.”
And it continues…” I stayed in the women’s shelter several times. Hid at my daughter's house a lot. He’d follow us. Run us off the road. Sit in the woods at night watching her house. Rip wires out of my car when I was sleeping. But the phone calls were the worst. He’d keep calling. 30x a night, sometimes. I could have taken the phone off the hook, but somehow I thought that at least if he was calling, I knew he wasn’t outside. When the phone would ring, it meant I could move away from my post by the window. When he didn’t call, I stayed there all night waiting. His most common threat was that he’d blow my head off and leave me in a ditch somewhere. I believed him. He said he’d kill my girls if I left. I believed him. It was so much easier to stay.”